Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Monday July 21, 2008 @05:18PM
from the sky-is-falling dept.

chareverie writes "Fortify Software released a study where they concluded that open source software poses a large security risk to corporations who have implemented it. They reason this by stating that the fault lies within the open source communities and their failure to adhere to minimum security practices. Fortify Software studied 11 open source software packages, where the application server Tomcat was determined to be the best. The other 10 were found to have poor results, with those being Derby, Geronimo, Hibernate, Hipergate, JBoss, Jonas, OFBiz, OpenCMS, Resin and Struts. Jacob West, manager of Fortify's research group, reminds that purpose of the study was 'not to condemn open source software, but rather to point out that the security practices need to improve because open source adoption by enterprises and governments is growing.'"

Eric S. Raymond discusses the recent Microsoft security debacle in which an engineer inserted a back door in a library that allowed access with the phrase 'Netscape engineers are weenies!' The article notes that 'Apache will *never* have a back door like this one.